Originally Posted By: Joe Ramsay
My question was more about your opinions about the tool itself, and what success you folks have had. That's why I said "assuming good songwriting" etc. Of course you need the skills and "raw material" - with bricks, wood and hammer you still need the skills to build a house, but if all you have is straw and mud, skills won't take you as far.

Hey Joe!

Sorry if my response sounded snarky in any way...that was not my intent. What I meant to convey is that BIAB does indeed give you the tools to produce pro music but there is a lot of work that goes into getting from the "box" to the CD! smile

A couple of your points interested me as I have only used the product for a couple of years now and I had lots of the same questions as you.

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Other than on this forum, there is lot of poo-pooing BIAB as a recording and production tool out there on the net.

I have also noticed this attitude about BIAB around the internet. And some of the criticisms have some merit. For example, the GUI is often criticized, and even though there were recent improvements made, this product's GUI still feels like Windows 3.1! And the program has been around for so long that it is inevitable that there are tons of little features and options and settings scattered all over the place. This is a huge turn-off to many people, especially younger folks who love sleek and easy-to-use software that not only does its intended job but looks great doing it!

I suspect another reason for this is the demographic for BIAB currently is more "mature" musicians! smile There are very few, if any, cool, young turks around these forums mixing it up and talking about modern music styles and trends. Lots of us are here talking about how great the music was in the good ol' days, asking for more classic country and jazz styles and complaining about the kids on our lawns (I mean no offense and I am including myself in this silly generalization about our mature generation!!!)

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The main complaint is that the realtracks are all based on a limited number of musical phrases.

Again, there is some truth to this complaint. The RealTracks are indeed based on a limited number of musical phrases and the styles, while immensely helpful to noobs like me, just increase the odds that your "original" song will sound an awful like the songs of other BIABers! But PG provides a very large number of RealTracks and you can mix and match them to your hearts content. Plus you can always export them and do major edits to them in your DAW to further "uniquify" them. And, as I am recently learning, you can do some pretty amazing stuff with MIDI in BIAB if you have some great sample libraries!

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most studio musicians have a limited number of phrases too ... or at least a selection of favourites.

Very good point! Should I not use a Les Paul guitar because so many folks have already done that? How about a standard drum kit? Same old same old?

For me the bottom line is this is a truly amazing tool and nothing even compares to it currently. The stuff I hear from Garageband sounds stiff and formulaic. While songs that are carefully crafted using BIAB sound lifelike and true and simply amazing! Yes, the GUI still needs some work and yes, if you only use BIAB to produce quick backing tracks they may sound a little familiar but if you put in the effort you can create amazing music with this product and no one will know if it is "live or Memorex"!